By ROY FURCHGOTT

Published: March 22, 2012

When Cisco Systems said it would stop making its popular Flip video cameras, it also announced that it would eventually shut down its FlipShare video sharing and storage service. Last May it put a 30-day expiration date on videos and photos stored there. Anything more than 30 days old would be erased.

FlipShare gave users a reprieve, never making good on the policy. But 30 days from now it will, partly because it has cut a deal with another site, Givit, where FlipShare users can transfer their videos.

The deal is that Givit provides two gigabytes of free storage (that's about three hours of video) - but that's not unusual. Anybody who wants to sign up gets the same two gigabytes.

It becomes a better deal, though, if you need more storage and decide to sign up for Givit's pay service. People coming over from FlipShare get twice as much storage as non-FlipShare users for the same price. So a regular new user would get 10 gigabytes of storage at $30 for a year, whereas a FlipShare user would get 20 gigabytes for the same $30.

The other feature that might make switching to Givit worthwhile is that it has one-button transfer, so the process should be easy. Otherwise, you may have to download videos back to your computer before you can load them back up to another service. Not a Herculean task, but not exactly convenient either.

Up to this point, the feature that separated Givit from other services was the degree of privacy it allowed for videos. It allows you to send a password-protected link by e-mail. To see your photos or videos, recipients need both your link and their own Givit passwords, which are free. You can cancel anyone's access to your images, even if you had permitted it before, whenever you want.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.